Foreign secretary Nirupama Rao’s visit to Sri Lanka this week will be followed by that of Indian Army chief, Gen V.K. Singh, early next month.

The general’s visit will be part of a series of high-level visits that have been pencilled in for the next few months. Also on the anvil are the visits by Indian Air Force chief Air Chief Marshal P.V. Naik and defence secretary Pradeep Kumar, in that order. The Indian Navy chief, Admiral Nirmal Verma, visited Sri Lanka in June.

External affairs minister S.M. Krishna is expected to visit Colombo later this year. His Sri Lankan counterpart, G.L. Peiris, is scheduled to visit India in October for delivering a lecture here, on the margins of which he can be expected to hold consultations with the Indian government on the progress of the decisions arrived at in Lankan president Mahinda Rajapaksa’s visit here in June.

These visits are expected to lay the foundation of a robust framework of bilateral cooperation in the post-LTTE era, in areas such as defence and security cooperation, trade and investment, infrastructure development, people-to-people ties, and rehabilitation of the war-ravaged northern and eastern provinces of Sri Lanka.

Besides an annual defence dialogue, India and Sri Lanka would be looking to step up maritime-security cooperation and increase the level and frequency of defence exchanges.

A proposal on the table is to have more interactions between the middle-level officials in the armed forces of the two countries, so that the future decision-makers are familiarised with the actual state of play in the bilateral relationship.

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